Although I knew what happened in those camps, hearing the stories from one who had survived brought them to life in a most gruesome manner. Sometimes I had trouble listening, even though Henry appeared almost like a small boy relating a bad dream. Some of his tales were simply beyond my comprehension, as I had never personally witnessed that underbelly of the human race. He usually ended his stories as he finished his second cup of sugar-laden coffee and I would go home then, unable to sleep. I filed his stories away, deep inside, knowing I would have to write about them one day but wondering if, or when, I would have the ability or courage to do them justice.
A decade later I felt it was time.
My wife and I were on a train in Eastern Europe, knowing we would end up in Auschwitz, but putting it off until the end. I immediately recognized the main gate from historic photos. The curving wrought iron sign overhead said, “Work will set you free” in German. As I stepped across that most infamous of portals, I felt Henry standing next to me. He wore blue-and-white striped pajamas with a pillbox hat. There was a yellow star sewn haphazardly over the left breast and his tattoo number, 976843 was stenciled over the pocket. He was young again; stick thin, with eyes deeply sunk from terror.
I looked left and right down the double row of barbed wire fences at multiple guard towers that once held dogs and machine guns. Aging and faded wooden signs warned inmates to halt ten feet from the wire or be shot. Henry told me the fences had been electrified and that many prisoners, unable to take the abuse any longer, would fling themselves onto the fence to end the misery. With that, he touched the fence to send sparks flying, but I know I am the only one who saw that. The electricity was cut in 1945.
He walked by my side as we entered the first barracks where a hundred victims had been crammed onto a cold stone floor in a room designed to hold maybe twenty. Inside the doorway was a large quote from George Santayana that read, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” His hand on my lower back urged me along. We passed entire rooms filled with human hair, children’s shoes, people’s luggage, prosthetic limbs, and all the countless accessories of normal daily life that had been stripped from the inmates along with their dignity. The other barracks were the same, glass-walled dioramas filled floor to ceiling with tiny pieces of lives cut short. I was unable to take my eyes off the room full of little girls’ dolls, all staring vacantly, waiting for their playmates who never returned. By the time we left the compound the collective sorrow of Europe hung like a thick fog.
Each building held its own tale of horror and suffering that reached a crescendo in the SS holding cells. Henry led me down the dark stairway lit by a single naked bulb. There, in tiny dark cubicles, below ground with no windows, narrow enough to touch all walls while standing in the center, unspeakable tortures were applied to those who had no information to give up. People who were guilty of nothing other than being a Jew or Gypsy, or in many cases, simply being educated, spent their final hours in these cells, crying with pain, trembling with fear. I could barely make out the word “mercy” on one wall in dried blood. The only exit from those cells was the path to the gallows or gas chamber. It was there that I first saw the ghosts.
When you walk through Auschwitz you see ghosts. I saw hundreds. There is nothing supernatural about it, there are no holograms or trick mirrors: Their spirits are wedded to the place. You can hear them whispering their stories as they pass you. They hold your gaze because they want you to listen and to know. In just four years of existence, Auschwitz tore a giant hole in the collective consciousness of mankind and left behind the shattered essence of too many souls for them not to be seen. Incomprehension of man’s cruelty washed over me and trampled any vestigial belief I had in inherent kindness. Because of that place, humanity could not be completely whole again.
Next, I followed Henry to the “Killing Wall,” a simple stone slab where those no longer useful as human guinea pigs or too weak to be worked to death, were summarily shot. He pointed low on the wall to the holes where the bullets passed cleanly through the young children. Next to the wall were the hanging poles where those condemned to live a bit longer were left to dangle, their feet off the ground, their hands tied behind their backs, as they were jerked upwards by ropes around their wrists until their shoulders dislocated. Henry bent over to show me how he had been hung.
I sat for a moment, debating whether or not to leave at that point, empathy for those interred under our feet, bearing down like a physical weight, but Henry stood in front of me shaking his head that we were not through yet.
The gas chambers sat low and squat, concrete bunkers with sod roofs, neatly framed by a beautiful forest only a few yards away. We stopped at the massive steel door to peer through the tiny glass porthole where SS guards watched countless thousands asphyxiate inside as Cyklon B, developed as an insecticide, spread its deadly fumes into innocent lungs. Sometimes people gasped for up to a half hour. This is where Henry had worked, handling bodies. I hesitated at the door and he pushed me through, intimating that he could go no further, but that I had to.
Two and a half million lives were ended in that room for the simple fact that they were not Aryan. With a nod from Henry, I fell into line with the ghosts filing in one by one. I stood in the middle of hundreds of the dead and with closed eyes imagined the gas pellets being dropped through the ceiling vent. I heard them drop and begin to hiss like vipers as they released their deadly vapor. I felt myself choking and sucking for air and I was silently screaming like those all around me, but then I opened my eyes and I was alone in deafening silence. A dull bulb illuminated the room, its floor streaked black from the bodily fluids that exit a body upon death that no amount of cleaning can eliminate.
I forced myself into the next room with the giant ovens whose fires consumed the mortal remains. Even though the ovens were scrubbed clean decades ago and the walls disinfected, there is a pervasive stench that reaches the visitor’s soul. The smell of burnt flesh is something never forgotten. My stomach was tied in knots, my hands trembled, and my eyes were filled with tears as I stepped outside into the brilliant sunshine of a beautiful day, realizing I was gasping. Henry was waiting for me. He was crying too.
Together, we walked behind the crematorium to a rotting wooden gallows where the camp commandant, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Rudolph Hoss had been hung in 1947 for crimes against humanity, but I felt nothing. No price was sufficient to balance the debt he owed. It was Hoss who introduced Cyklon B as an efficient killing tool, allowing the SS to murder 2,000 people per hour when the ovens were operating at full capacity. It was his own written estimates that claimed close to 2.5 million people died in his gas chambers, while another half million died of overwork, starvation, beatings, or simply gave up the will to survive. Ironically, the Nazis were among the world’s best record keepers and documented every atrocity, often with photos. It was that Teutonic efficiency that finally sent many of them to the gallows after the Nuremberg trials. When Russian soldiers entered the camp on January 27, 1945, Henry was unaware that the last of his guards had fled the previous night. There were 7,500 people still alive in the camp. Henry weighed 92 pounds.
He whispered in my ear that this story, told so many times before, still needed to be repeated, not just now but every now and then, lest the prophecy of Santayana come true. With that, he told me he was going to be with his Berte and he left me for the last time, merging with the other ghosts.
Two decades had passed since I sat down to that first coffee with Henry Leman. I came to believe he picked me as a confidant because I was convenient and for no other reason, but I am grateful that he did. He was a constant reminder of the kind of person I wanted to be. He was at my side as we walked through that camp and his ghost still enters my thoughts often. I am sure he knows that his story is being told and I know he is now happy with his Berte.
As we walked toward the gate to exit I remembered an old Jewish tradition of placing a stone on a grave. This was not
Henry’s grave, but it came pretty close. I approached the barbed wire and took a final look back. The ghosts were disappearing inside the compound. I picked up a stone from inside the gate and carried it just outside the camp where I left it.
Henry Leman was finally free.
The Watts Towers
Homecoming
As a child in Los Angeles, if I stood on my tiptoes on the roof of my parent’s garage, I could see the tallest spires of the Watts Towers. That roof was my youthful sanctuary where my imagination turned the towers into far away mountains or castle turrets that I would explore one day. The towers were whatever I wished them to be, my portal to exotic places found only in magazines, and on the rare occasion that my family would walk to see them, they were too magical to be real, like an apparition.
At the tender age of four, my white, Scottish-German parents bundled me into their ’52 Buick for a cross-country odyssey to California to escape both their family and the Illinois winters. My sole recollection of that journey is of my trying to grab a rattlesnake somewhere in the never-ending expanse of Texas, and my father jerking me violently away.
That was 1953 and California issued a strong siren call to the greatest generation still recovering from a war. Hipsters wore zoot suits, and low riders cruised Whittier Boulevard four inches off the ground. The Lawrence Welk orchestra played on a barge off the coast of Santa Monica, and I watched my parents dance to his music on local live television. It was the dull and quiet Eisenhower era and we quickly found out the only place we could afford to live in sunny Los Angeles was a suburb called Watts.
Watts was the West Coast Harlem then, considered a ghetto by some. It did not matter to my parents that we were the only white people in sight. Within weeks they had found work and I was being cared for by a black lady after school until my folks could pick me up at night. I did not think in terms of black and white then. A color-blind neighborhood accepted us as their own, and I was probably six before I had a white playmate.
A quiet truce existed between white and black in Los Angeles at that time. It was an accepted but not publicly acknowledged, separate but equal apartheid, that I, in my Midwestern shell, was totally oblivious to. So that August in 1965, when the police rousted a black motorist for a traffic violation, the pent-up subterranean anger of half a city boiled over into a week of looting, arson, beatings, and total civil unrest. What came to be known as the Watts Riots was my universe imploding.
We had recently moved to a more mixed-race suburb but the only world I really knew, the black world, was on fire. We sat mesmerized by the television, watching our adopted home self-destruct. My family hunkered down for a week, confused refugees behind enemy lines. For several nights, I slept sporadically between gunshots. When I returned to school I found myself looking over my shoulder. I did not understand the anger of the black community nor the white response to it. It was the first time that life hit me between the eyes.
Trauma has a way of burrowing into one’s psyche. We fool ourselves by assuming that since the event has passed, so has the damage. That is rarely true. I was about to go out into the vast world on my own for the first time, and because of that life altering week, I found myself thinking the same prejudiced thoughts as the rest of mainstream white America.
I left home soon afterwards and years and careers came and went as a travel writer’s life slowly embraced me. That life carried me around the planet until somewhere between Timbuktu and Ouagadougou, the words of Mark Twain began to make a lot of sense; “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” It was certainly what I needed.
Just as Mister Twain said it would, my wanderings revealed the equality of all mankind and helped put to rest the dark images of so long ago. I had dropped a lot of baggage in my travels and felt the need to return to where I started. I went back to Watts after five decades, unsure of what I was looking for, and afraid of what I might find.
The neighborhood was a time capsule of the Eisenhower years, dull and unchanging, just the way its denizens wanted it to stay. Spanish stucco bungalows hid behind wrought iron bars and gated lawns and most walls were frescoed with what would only much later come to be known as graffiti. It still held the veneer of a rough and tumble barrio, but the undertone of menace was gone. The war zone I recalled had patched its wounds and now bore its scars like a champion fighter. I followed my old neighborhood’s train tracks north to the towers.
Five decades changes ones perspective and seeing them again triggered not just memories, but emotions. They were not nearly as tall as my child’s mind remembered them, but their power over me had not dissipated.
They are not a grand opus of artistic creativity like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona whose general shape they mimic: they are, in fact, the opposite, simple and plain, like the gypsy souled immigrant who created them as an act of love to the city that took him in.
They are the creation of Mr. Simon Rodia, a tile mason by trade, but one gifted with the ability to raise craft to high art. Rodia was born in Italy in 1879 and came to America in 1894 where he wandered from place to place until finally settling in Watts in 1920. The following year he began building a series of towers on his land, baffling his neighbors who thought him mentally unbalanced. They could not grasp that his was a labor of love and a thank you to the city that had given him a better life
But to understand what this man has done, you must get up close and personal, because the Watts Towers are at once a monumental work of both architecture and art, and as you look even closer, they are the finest possible metaphor for a city composed almost entirely of people from other places. Rodia spent years collecting the cast-off detritus of the poorest section of a vast metropolis. His silhouette was a common site in the early morning haze that coats the Los Angeles basin a quarter of the year. Wandering the railroad tracks where the transients and poor dumped their refuse, he would return home each afternoon, arms full of discarded chunks of others’ lives, and work through the night imbedding all of it in his creation. Broken coffee cups, pieces of glass, shards of tile, dolls heads and more all found new life in the growing monument. Neighborhood children brought him bits and pieces of green glass from their soda bottles, immortalizing the drinks of the times; Squirt, 7 Up, and Bubble Up. Wonderful deep blue glass came from old milk of magnesia bottles.
The concept was simple, seventeen interconnected towers made of rebar, wrapped in wire mesh, and coated with concrete. Rodia lived in a small shack among his towers and his miner’s headlamp was a familiar light to the neighbors as he spent the darkness imbedding his found shards into the concrete.
It is difficult to consider the towers without also offering a simple comparison to the work of his fellow Italian, Michelangelo Buonaratti; between the tile cutter and the stone cutter. Two obsessive geniuses who worked day and night, forsaking any sort of normal life, devoting years to superhuman tasks of creation, one to a city, the other to God. No, the towers are not the monumental achievement of the Sistine but they are a symbol of hope for the working man, a title both artists were proud to own. Michelangelo labored at his task for three years; Rodia for nearly three decades.
Rodia tried many times to explain that his towers were a metaphor for Los Angeles, representing all the disparate cultures, religions, and languages that made it a city from somewhere else. He referred to them as “Nuestra Familia,” our family, but the times were quite ignorant. The towers were frequently vandalized during the rare times that he left them. The city labeled them an eyesore and tried to have them demolished, saying they would be unsafe during an earthquake, but when engineers tried to pull them down, they held fast, refusing even to bend. As Rodia aged, his health declined from a life of hard labor and he tired of battling bureaucratic red tape. In 1955, he “quit claimed” his towers to a neighbor and moved to Martinez, California, where he died ten years later at his sister’s home. After his departure, the tiny shack
he had lived in mysteriously burned down. There is no mention of him ever returning to Watts again.
Ownership of the towers changed hands numerous times and eventually they ended up on four separate historical registers, while they are currently under consideration to be named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Rodia died without knowing his towers had become the symbol of the city. In recent years the towers have appeared in dozens of movies, countless television shows, been mentioned in Broadway plays and been referenced in literature and song. Today, they are an international landmark.
Seeing them after five decades was not just a homecoming, but a minor epiphany, as I understood for the first time what Rodia was trying to accomplish. In them I still saw the faraway places of my youth, but now they were tempered by the imagery of my own travels in the real world. The towers were not just a microcosm of Watts, or even Los Angeles, they were a vision of a world come together, and for me personally, they are a manifestation of everywhere I had been, but had I not journeyed so long and so far, I most likely would never have realized that.
I sat for most of an afternoon staring at the towers and letting them take me back to so many places. I sat there for so long that an elderly lady approached to ask if I was alright. I assured her I was and we found ourselves engaged in a most pleasant conversation. Her home was directly across the street from the towers and she had lived in Watts her entire life.
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